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It’s fairly easy to achieve consensus on what constitutes a “summer song,” but winter is tougher to pin down musically.

Winter is less universal, for one. Many people never get to experience the singular magic of a fluffy nighttime snowfall. And it’s a more insular experience; indeed, a more insulated experience. Winter means lots of staying inside and gazing out windows, lots of solitude, lots of darkness; barren landscapes and empty, windswept streetscapes, swathes of stasis hurried through whilst bent against the January wind; the meditative pleasures of skiing and skating and snowshoeing; catching the scent of wood smoke on the breeze; opening the door for the first time on an unexpected thaw; delighting in the crunch of snow and ice underfoot.

One tends only to notice what a wonderland winter really is when one is alone.

That’s my experience, anyway. The following winter playlist, which I encourage you to listen to in sequence, is a good approximation in sound of how the season makes me feel. I’d be curious to hear yours.

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Hawksley Workman, “Autumn’s Here”

I don’t want to call it Hawskley’s best song because there’s a lot of good stuff in the songbook, but this bittersweet gem from 2003’s Lover/Fighter is as perfect a description as any Canadian has ever written of the resignation and quiet wonder one feels each year as the seasons march toward the colder months. “So find a sweater / And you’ll be better / Until the kindling / Is tinder dry . . . ”

Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater”

For 30 years, Hoboken indie-rock heroes Yo La Tengo have never shied away from gettin’ “snuggly” in their quieter moments. This gentle, bleary-eyed, woolly/fuzzy love song from 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, however, might be the band’s snuggliest tune ever. I can picture that sweater.

Galaxie 500, “Listen, The Snow Is Falling”

If you’ve ever stood still in a field or a park or a forest at night and actually heard snowflakes falling around you, trust me when I say you’ll get the same goosebumps from this tune. Props to Yoko Ono for the beautiful original, but an extended Dean Wareham guitar burnout elevates this version to “definitive.”

The tinkertoy prelude “Frosti” catches the glint of starlight on ice crystals before “Aurora” follows the rhythmic punch of footprints through crusty snow into the great, white wide open. Of all the love letters to the Icelandic winter found on 2001’s Vespertine, this might be the loveliest.

Thus Owls, “It’s Gone Now”

The sound of “alone” in the bleak mid-winter. The distance between Thus Owls’ harrowing second album, Harbours — recorded in frontwoman Erika Angell’s native Sweden during the winter months of 2011 — and the far warmer sounds yielded from summer sessions in husband Simon Angell’s hometown Montreal for 2014’s Turning Rocks is so vast one could construct an entire treatise on seasonal affective disorder around them.

Sigur Ros, “Sigur Ros”

I was flying over Greenland the first time I heard the amorphous, elemental, 10-minute opening track to Sigur Ros’s debut album, Von, and I’m convinced the universe was up to something. It’s the very embodiment of frigid desolation. The Icelandic prog voyagers would get prettier and more tuneful from here on in, but this first statement speaks volumes about the empty, awe-inspiring terrain from which they sprang.

Boards of Canada, “Sixtyten”

Glacial breakbeat electronica from a couple of mad Scotsmen whose inscrutable analogue weirdness claims old National Film Board of Canada soundtracks as a formative inspiration. Chilly, but you can sense life stirring beneath the frosted technoscape.

Weakerthans, “One Great City!”

John K. Samson doesn’t expressly have to sing about Winnipeg in February to accurately express the mixture of at-wit’s-end bitterness and survivalist pride everyone I’ve ever known from Winnipeg experiences each February. It’s a love letter, despite a refrain that intones: “I. Hate. Winnipeg.”

Elliott Smith, “Angel in the Snow”

Leave it to the late, great Elliott Smith to transform something as innocent as a snow angel into a poignant metaphor for the transience of love and life itself.

Neil Young, “Winterlong”

Thought you were getting out of here without a Neil Young song, didn’t you? Aches with the weight of waiting through the winter for sunnier times.

Sloan, “Snowsuit Sound”

Release! It actually does kind of swish/swish with that snowsuit sound if you think about it. Jangles like springtime.

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